


Not Quite Sherlockian

by 23Murasaki



Category: Kuroshitsuji | Black Butler
Genre: Ace Detective Soma Kadar, Agni is a nice person, Gen, I sincerely overthought demon!Ciel, No he's not he actually sucks at it but WHATEVER, Post-Season/Series 02, Reincarnation, Sherlock Holmes References, This is not going by the manga okay, very old fic
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-06-23
Updated: 2016-06-22
Packaged: 2018-07-16 18:07:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,444
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7278400
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/23Murasaki/pseuds/23Murasaki
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It's just one of those circumstances where crashing on a strangers couch, running a detective agency out of his living room, and promising to rescue a one eyed guy for a beautiful blonde makes absolute sense in context, you know what I'm saying?</p>
<p>(More than a century after Kuro II, 19-year-old Soma arrives in England for his study abroad year. Shenanigans of the Kuroshitsuji-standard sort ensue.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Not Quite Sherlockian

      If first impressions were anything, Soma  was going to hate his study abroad year. The airport was loud and packed, and he had had a splitting headache before one of his flights had been delayed three hours, he had missed his connection, and had had to detour through Madrid. But, at least he was in London now, albeit late and alone and tired. Nothing else could go wrong–

        The escalator malfunctioned as he was about to step off of it, and he and both of his oversized suitcases went tumbling. To make matters arguably even more awkward, he soon found himself half-leaning, half-clinging to a guy he didn’t know.

        “Shit. Sorry,” Soma mumbled. His rescuer set him back upright and handed him his bags again. 

        “Are you alright?” he asked. His voice was deep, and he didn’t look all that much older than Soma himself, if one ignored the pure-white hair, cut short except for a few braids, and the bandages wrapped tightly around one of his arms. Odd, it didn’t seem like he was injured…

        “... Yeah,” he replied. There was no reason to go full Sherlock on someone in the airport. The stranger grinned in relief, and the expression seemed pleasantly familiar.

        “Ah! I am glad! There is still a distance for you to travel today...” So there was, all way to the university to see what could be done about housing... The stranger’s eyes were warm when he talked, and his accent made Soma think of home, even though it wasn’t quite the same. While he was strange, he was certainly not a danger... Before he could think through the gesture, Soma had stuck out a hand in greeting. 

        “Geez, sorry, I’m forgetting how to people.” That wasn’t a verb. He knew he was tired when he started talking like a Tumblr post. “My name’s Soma. What’s yours?” 

        “My name is Agni,” said the stranger, his smile widening. “Here, I do not have many bags. Let me help you with yours!” 

        Going along with this was completely irrational, but Agni had a car to get to campus with, a spare bedroom when Soma was informed that his forms had gotten so lost they may as well have not existed, and a kitchen full of delicious-smelling leftovers. In this case, irrational seemed like a good idea.

        “You know,” said Soma around a mouthful of curry bread, “If you’re a serial killer or something, I’m not even gonna be upset.”

        “I am not a serial killer!” yelped Agni, looking more upset than affronted. “I am studying medicine!” His expression melted into one of concern. “Though, it was said that the same was true of Jack the Ripper...” 

        “Lucky I’m not a prostitute, then,” said Soma, and the matter seemed to be settled. For some unknown reason. 

\-------  
        He wasn’t murdered in the night, Agni evidently was known by real people, and the Sherlock Holmes museum on Baker street was open. If second impressions were anything to judge by, Soma was going to love his study abroad year. He felt like he was in an ocean of questions and answers and ridiculous ideas that could just work, and he could throw them all at Agni. It was strange, really. They’d known each other less than a day, but Soma felt like they had been friends for a lifetime. 

        “You know what we should do?” he asked, taking a sharp detour from his previous rant about binoculars, sharp enough to even startle himself. Agni blinked. 

        “Perhaps get lunch?” he offered. That seemed like a plan. 

        “That too,” agreed Soma. “But we should open a detective agency!” He had brought that up a hundred times before to his friends at home, and they had teased him until he had shut up about it and settled for keeping printouts and newsclippings of unsolved murders and disappearances in a box under his bed. The box was in the bottom of one of his suitcases, because he hadn’t been able to bear the thought of leaving it behind. 

        “Like Holmes and Watson?” asked Agni, smiling again. “That could be most interesting!” Soma could have kissed him at that moment. But that would have been weird, so he settled for a violent hug and a declaration:

        “Yeah! You’ll be the best Watson ever!” 

        “Jo aagya,” murmured Agni, so quietly that the next moment Soma convinced himself it was just his imagination.

——

        The sign went up after the first week of classes, during which Soma’s housing paperwork had been miraculously found and then promptly ignored. He promised Agni he would pay rent, Agni insisted that he didn’t need to, and they argued politely for an hour until Soma threw a checkbook at his head and declared that he was at least going to pay for office space. So they put up a sign. It was very nice and looked a bit like the one outside the museum. 

        “... And now what?” asked Soma, because he didn’t usually think things through as much as he liked to pretend he did. “Do we advertise? Wait for a client?”

        “Fate will bring us a client,” said Agni with a knowing smile. Soma tried not to scoff, he really did. 

        “Fate, huh?” he muttered. He didn’t believe in fate, or gods, or miracles, or magic. Ever since he had been little, he had devoted himself to reality. Every mystery could be solved with logic, reason, and the right questions, after all. If Agni heard him, he didn’t react, instead humming to himself as he ran bandaged fingers over the swords of a tiny idol of a goddess Soma didn’t recognize.

        Fate could do its thing, he supposed. In the mean time, he printed out thirty flyers and pasted them up around campus between classes. He considered giving one to the university newspaper, but decided against it when he saw a girl camped out in front of their office, surrounded by alcohol and weird symbols. He vaguely recognized her from the foreign students meeting, but had no desire to hang around with someone who was selling love potions that smelled like cheap whiskey. 

\------  
   
      Whether by the powers of fate or advertising, a beautiful girl knocked on their door the next Saturday. For a split second, she didn’t seem real, with blonde curls cascading over her shoulder and a tiny, beribboned top hat with the same pattern as her ruffled, pink and black dress. She looked almost like she had stepped out of a picture... Soma blinked. The girl took a deep breath. 

        “Hi,” she said. “This is going to sound really stupid.”

        “Okay,” replied Soma wittily. “I’m good at stupid.” Well, that statement just proved itself. The girl looked a little concerned, then Agni materialized in the doorway with a teapot. 

        “Would you like to come inside, Miss?” he asked. “We will be happy to help in any way we can.” Her face relaxed into a grateful smile, and Agni somehow managed to shoo both of them onto a couch while pouring tea and apologizing that the only carbohydrate in the house presently was naan. The girl giggled and assured him that was alright and then suddenly there was naan and jam to be had as well. 

        “Now,” said Soma, making sure to not talk with his mouth full this time. “Whom do you want us to help?” It was a shot in the dark, but the girl looked perfectly fine herself, just concerned... She gasped slightly, then giggled again. 

        “My, you really are a consulting detective, then!” she declared, before her expression turned serious again. “I should start at the beginning. My name is Lizzie – Elizabeth – Grey, and I need to you find a boy who I think may be in danger.” Soma put down his teacup.

        “Go on.” Lizzie Grey took a deep breath.

        “This is going to sound so, so stupid. I don’t even know his name. I... A few of my friends took me out to a club just before the start of term. There was a boy... I don’t know why I even saw him, he was all dressed in black... He was there each time we came back, too...” She hesitated, and twisted a lock of her hair. “Oh, this does sound stupid.”

        “Well, it doesn’t matter how you saw him, right?” said Soma. “You think he’s in trouble. Why?”

        “... I saw him talking to people,” said Lizzie uncertainly. “He only ever talks to them one at at time, drags them off into a dark corner. Mattie– my friend, she was the one who took me there – listened in, and said it was like he wasn’t really talking to them at all. She said it was really weird, his voice and everything... He kept asking what they wanted... So I went to talk to him myself, because Mattie was too scared.” She paused. “It’s safer if I do it, you know– I do krav maga and everything– anyway I went to talk to him, but he spooked when I got close and... then there was that guy in the alley…”

        “That guy?” Soma prompted. 

        “The boy in the club met him outside. He was... creepy, I don’t know how else to say it! He didn’t look right!” She bit her lip. “Do you know what I mean?”

        “Perfectly,” said Agni, suddenly in an armchair. “Please continue. Did you have a chance to speak to the young man in the club?”

        “... That’s just it,” said Lizzie slowly. “I had a lot of chances. Even when he wasn’t talking to anyone, every time I got near him he’d make up some sort of excuse to not stay, and we never talked for more than a minute. I followed him out once, into the alley, and... and...” She trailed off, twisting a pretty blue ring on her thumb. 

        “He didn’t hurt you!?” blurted Soma leaning forward. Agni seemed poised to move – to attack, was the first idiotic thought that came to his mind – braced against the armchair. 

        “No,” said Lizzie. “He turned around, and his eyes were red... And I could have sworn– oh, I know it must have been a trick of the light, but inside the club, when he had that eyepatch on, he had such pretty blue eyes– well, one eye– and I must have screamed, because Mattie and the others came running, but he wasn’t there anymore... The alley’s a dead end, you know, but he was gone, and that strange man with him... They both had eyes like...” She stopped, shook her head, and pulled herself together.

“So, you must understand what I mean when I say this sounds stupid out loud. I ought to be scared of him, not for him, oughtn’t I?”

        “Do you think he’s mixed up in drugs or something?” asked Soma. Lizzie frowned.   
        “It would have to be something like that, wouldn’t it?” she agreed dubiously. “People on campus were talking about cults, but I think that’s just because of Linde’s little shop of horrors…”

        “We’ll take your case! Maybe he’ll talk to me sooner than to you.” Soma cracked a grin. “You’re kind of an imposing person, you know.” She smiled too, a little hesitantly, so he pressed on. “Pretty sure, if I was involved in something skeevy, I wouldn’t want you going after me either. We’ll get to the bottom of this.”

        “Certainly,” agreed Agni. He didn’t look poised to spring anymore, but he was looking warily at the little idol of the goddess with all the swords.

——

        Lizzie brought reinforcements to the club. Mattie had reddish hair cut boyishly short and freckles that spilled over her exposed shoulders and arms, and she talked with broad, theatrical gestures, backing up Lizzie’s story. Delicate, blonde Jo seemed less eager to talk, but launched into a nervous ramble about mind-altering substances and the history of mythological monsters that made even less sense than Soma had thought possible. Mattie patted her on the head.

        “Love, I am like 88% convinced he’s not a zombie. We’ll be fine,” she said. Jo looked, if possible, even more upset, and tugged at her stiff, pink skirt. Each girl looked like she had walked out of a different era. 

        “... nutrients found in human blood, though,” mumbled Jo. Lizzie slung a friendly arm over her shoulder. 

        “If they are vampires, we can stake them, right?” she chirped. Jo nodded warily, and Mattie laughed. 

        “Sure,” she said. “Always wanted to be like Buffy, you know?” Soma decided this was neither the time nor the place to bring up the nonexistence of vampires, because Lizzie and her friends were playing off of one another so much that he was pretty sure they would be capable of running the mystery boy down and bringing him in for questioning all on their own. 

        “It seems we are moral support, today,” murmured Agni, who had evidently reached the same conclusion. He was smiling again, which was a definite improvement over staring into space and/or at the statue. 

        “That’s good, then,” said Soma firmly. He decided to blame the sudden discomfort on the very detailed vampire stories Jo and Mattie were telling. 

——  
        Inside, the club was all loud music and low lights. Half the bar was wrapped in shadows, and the air was heavy with the smell of alcohol and perfumes and other things Soma couldn’t quite place. Mattie had stopped talking, and all three girls were looking around cautiously. Jo coughed with her hands over her nose and mouth, then mumbled a quick apology.

        “Does it always smell this bad?” Soma asked, and she nodded. Lizzie frowned a little.

        “It’s just at night, though,” she elaborated. “In the daytime it gets cleaned up.”

        “Wonkiest-smelling club I’ve been in,” admitted Mattie, “But there’s not usually problems…”

        “Gandhaka,” Agni said, as if he was coming to an upsetting conclusion. “The scent here,” he said by means of explanation when Soma and Lizzie looked at him askance.   
        “Does that mean something?” Lizzie asked. Soma cast about for a definition of the word. It was Bengali, after all, and he rarely spoke that language except with his mother and grandmother. 

        “It means,” said Agni, “That your friend with the eyepatch is here tonight.” Suddenly that sounded like a very bad thing. Lizzie looked around again, and then her gaze fixed on what had to be the shadowiest part of the bar. A young man around her age was there, leaning forward to murmur something into someone’s ear– Soma caught a glimpse of an impossibly blue eye and a black eyepatch, a wicked smirk, the other guy seemed startled with his glasses sliding down his nose– and Jo gave a little cry of shock. 

        “What?” hissed Lizzie. Jo looked wide-eyed.

        “I know him!” she whimpered. At the disbelieving stares, she hastened to elaborate. “N-not Eyepatch, the guy he’s with– I– we went to school together– Oh, you need to stop him!” Her voice got higher and higher with each word, and the last sentence was directed at Soma as she grabbed onto the front of his shirt. 

        “Yeah, that’s the plan,” he assured her. Mattie rolled her eyes as she pulled Jo away from him. 

        “Right. We’ll keep an eye on you and grab four-eyes if he bolts?”

        “Right,” agreed Lizzie, tightening her grip on her parasol as though she could actually stake someone with it. The end of it was certainly a little sharper than was normal on frilly parasols, as far as Soma knew. “Come on, you two.”

        The closer they got to the young man with the eyepatch, the darker it seemed to be. It was easy enough to blend in with the crowd for the time being – hell, even the two of them had lost track of Agni twice, only to find him waiting next to them, somehow invisible despite being more than six feet tall and dressed in a way that perhaps wouldn’t have drawn attention forty years prior. 

        Soma took a bold step towards the darkened bar, towards the guy with the eyepatch and his ... victim? Somehow that seemed like the proper word, and the kid looked so pale that he almost glowed in the dark. For a split second, because the lights must have been wrong, he must have imagined it, Eyepatch’s one blue eye turned burning red– Lizzie gasped and made a move with the parasol– Agni was gone again–

        “Hey, excuse me!” called Soma, waving a hand in Eyepatch’s general direction. The moment passed. Eyepatch’s head jerked up, and the too-blue eye went wide for a split second when he saw Soma, before he quickly schooled his expression into one of boredom.

        “May I help you?” His voice was cold, and he had the sort of stare that belonged to someone who knew his position and flaunted it– English schoolboys in India, the grandchildren and great-grandchildren of conquerors, had looked at Soma like that, as had professors both here and there, and people who said ‘foreigners’ and ‘colonials’ the way Death Eaters said ‘mudbloods’. Soma made himself smile hugely. 

        “Hey, sorry, this is going to sound stupid–” he started, deciding to make up his topic as he went along. 

        “Undoubtably,” said Eyepatch with a frown. Soma grabbed hold of a familiar story, one he had used with people like that before. 

        “You haven’t seen my sister about, have you?” he asked, looking as sheepish as he could. “She said she’d meet me here, but I haven’t seen her...” Big smile. “You look like her type, I figured she’d have at least come by. Um, you haven’t seen her, have you? She’s around this tall–” He gestured at chin height. “– black hair, answers to Meena–”

        There was a loud noise, and the counter Eyepatch had been leaning on suddenly had a long crack in it. The boy he had been talking to was jolted out of his stupor, and almost fell off of his barstool before Mattie grabbed his arm and hauled him away. From the brief glimpse Soma got of the boy’s face, he looked a peculiar combination of drunk and terrified. Eyepatch was visibly angry. 

        “I have not seen your sister,” he said, dragging the last word out so much that it sounded threatening. “And you have cost me dearly tonight.” 

        He had stood up at some point when Soma hadn’t been paying attention, and he was taller than expected... All of a sudden, the few remaining lights above the bar went out, plunging the area into irrationally total darkness, as if it had been cut off from the sound and flashing lights of the dance floor. He couldn’t see Mattie and the boy with the glasses, or the crack on the counter, nothing but a bright blue eye turning an inhuman burning red... He blindly aimed a punch in their general direction, and felt his fist make contact with what was probably a face. Something sharp grazed his neck in response, even as eyepatch stumbled back, and there was loud slam of a door, a yell–

        “Don’t you dare!” That was Lizzie, wasn’t it? Suddenly, the lights were back on, and people were staring. He blinked. Agni was standing by the fusebox on the wall, eyes narrow, and Lizzie was between Soma and the open door to the back alley, her parasol drawn like a sword. Mattie and Jo had the boy with the glasses. Good enough.

        “After him!” yelled Soma intelligently, and the three of them burst out into the alley. It was empty, except for a lingering smell Soma could not place. 

        They were too late. Lizzie swore in a manner that didn’t match her ruffly feminine clothes, but rather did match the krav maga and swordsplay. Agni, for some god forsaken reason, had reached the end of the dead-end street and was looking up, clutching something in his hand. 

        “What’s that?” Soma asked, maybe more snappily than he should have. Agni held out his hand, revealing a pair of glossy black feathers. 

        “A calling card,” he said quietly. “One from a very old friend.” 

        That brought up more questions than it answered, and Soma couldn’t put half of them into words. 

        “This is... bad, isn’t it?” he asked finally. When he got no response, he put on his best game face. “Well, whatever’s going on, we’ll get to the bottom of it!”

        “I do not doubt it,” said Agni with a small smile. “But the bottom may be very far down indeed.”

        “Got it,” said Soma. “I’ll pack rope. Enough to drag us, Eyepatch, and your friend out. How’s that sound?” And Agni laughed quietly, his sad eyes warming again, so evidently it sounded very good indeed.

**Author's Note:**

> I... don't think this is going to be updated tbqh, but I found it on my hard drive so it's going up here. 
> 
> If you like it, don't forget to stop by my other Kuroshitsuji fics (http://archiveofourown.org/series/69486 and http://archiveofourown.org/works/3411635/chapters/7470425) and/or check my profile for other fandoms we may have in common (I like Star Wars. Do you like Star Wars?). If you really really like it, check out my actual published book (https://www.amazon.com/Snows-Haz-Heart-World-Book-ebook/dp/B01AGQZ9YE)!


End file.
